by Michael Ward
What we see more certainly than causes are effects. Lewis had a predi-lection for periods in which the modern idea of interstellar space did not exist and the disturbing idea of an abyss as limitless as deep space was therefore similarly impossible. In medieval cosmology “There was no abyss.”52 Lewis believed that the feeling of being at home in the world is illusory; and that, if you were to visit a longed-for place it would only point beyond itself to some more distant object of longing.53 Our natural state is to feel that “in this universe we are treated as strangers” because “our real goal is elsewhere.”54
His poem “In Praise of Solid People” testifies to a “homeless longing”;55 and in “Poem for Psychoanalysts and/or Theologians” Lewis presents himself, 50. Ferenczi, “The Unwelcome Child and His Death Instinct,” 125–29.
51. Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” 592.
52. Lewis, “De Audiendis Poetis,” 7.
53. See, e.g., “The Landing” and “Leaving For Ever the Home of One’s Youth,” in
Poems, ed. Hooper, 41, 245.
54. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 103, 99.
55. Lewis, “In Praise of Solid People,” Poems, 199.
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impishly perhaps, but credibly nonetheless (in an idiom that recalls the Old English poem, “The Wanderer”) as wandering over a world whose roundness endlessly postpones arrival.56 Lewis has an awareness of the phenomenology of perception that makes the idea of perception as inherently illusory not only intelligible but more probable than the idea of it as refracting a solid world.
All such instances point to a sense of himself as the alienated inhabitant of a world that, for all its beauty, is dangerous and disappointing. At the same time, Lewis feels a deep recoil from philosophies that intensify the sense of the world’s moral and metaphysical arbitrariness.
The doctrine of the natural law provides a partial antidote to the horrors of subjectivism, relativism, or nihilism. The horrors are resisted in proportion as Lewis feels them more acutely. He sees that judgments take place within an ideological system. He understands, fears, and resists the impulse to conclude that there is nothing outside the system. Instead he maintains, according to the testimony of innumerable witnesses in many times and cultures, that beyond the perceptible universe is a changeless system of moral norms, not contingent, but built into the structure of reality. Miracles and reason in its most exalted mood he conceives of as entering the system from outside and testifying to this ultimate order of reality, which provides each culture with a source of sanctions and stability. God holds the world as a mother holds a child. A hostile critic might say that his psychological need to find an ultimate sanction for the moral beliefs within a cultural system discredits the theory of an ultimate sanction. But Lewis would point out that the need to believe is “on all fours” with the need not to.
Intellectualism
I have tried to establish that the loss that Lewis suffered on the death of his mother was not only the loss of her presence, love, and attention, but the loss also of the fundamental feeling of security in the world that his mother’s existence symbolized. The pain of such loss was obviously very extreme. It has always struck me as significant that Lewis was no good at mathematics, a subject in which his mother had obtained a first class degree.
He emphasizes in Surprised by Joy that he twice failed the mathematical part of Responsions. He would not have secured his undergraduate place at Oxford had not the university, after the war, waived the requirement that he pass this elementary part of the old Oxford entrance examination. Lewis was hopelessly incompetent, therefore, at a subject in which his mother excelled. There are many possible explanations of this, of course; and any 56. Lewis, “Poem for Psychoanalysts and/or Theologians,” 127.
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responsible psychotherapist would caution against the dangers of interpreting Lewis in his absence. It seems, however, not entirely reckless to suggest that he could not bear to involve himself imaginatively with a discipline so strongly associated with his mother. Unconsciously, he averts his attention.
Consciously, he’s just no good at mathematics. In some such way, we might be unconsciously defended against a whole range of painful recognitions.
And one very powerful means of defence, for an intellectual, is the intellect.
In writing about writers, it is customary either to ignore the part of the writer’s life before she or he could talk, or else to discuss it in terms of genealogy. Thus in the extant biographies of Lewis, the narrative becomes fully attentive to his imaginative life once he has got enough language to begin expressing it in words. Before that, we are told about the adults around him. But, to his parents of course, Lewis had had a lot of life by the time he wrote his first words and very much more again by the time he wrote the first of the books for which he is renowned. I want to suggest we should pay attention to this period of latency and try to imagine something of what may have been going on during it.
Few members of the intellectual professions, perhaps, have a highly developed sense of the dangers of intellectualism or over-reliance on the discursive intellect as a means of discovering truth. In academic writings on literature, it seems, explicit acknowledgement of this danger is rare; and a fortiori it is rarer still in those academic writings that aspire to theoretical sophistication. Yet intellectualism can be addictive and can preclude the genuine thoughtfulness that is a precondition for the appreciative reading of literature. For this reason it is important to remember that, like Eliot, Lewis was a poet before he was an academic57 and that, accordingly, he retained all his life a sense of the limitations of the intellect, which his expertise in exerting it was unable to occlude.
Certainly Lewis recognized that intellectual activity can be addictive and a defence. He refers to “the incurable intellectualism of my own approach”;58 acknowledges that “the limitations of my own gifts has [ sic]
compelled me to use a purely intellectual approach.”59 He asserts the necessity of thinking not just with the intellect but in a way that involves “the whole man.”60 Great literature, and especially poetry, was for Lewis powerfully conducive to thinking of this kind. Reading it well was therefore, for 57. It is no less important to remember that Lewis was a child before he was a poet.
58. Lewis, “God in the Dock,” 37.
59. Lewis, “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought,” 620.
60. See, e.g., “The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy,” in “The Weight of Glory,” 105; “It is by this middle element [the Chest] that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal,” The Abolition of Man, 19.
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him, an experience both therapeutic (it “heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality”61) and quasi devotional: “Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”62
The wound in Lewis, occasioned by the particular circumstances of his childhood, supplies both a motive for intellectual exertion and a wariness about the presumptions of the intellect. Lewis achieves here, towards the end of his life, a deep psychic reconciliation in which pain and insight, self-transcendence and self-fulfilment, are delicately harmonized. His strength as a theorist is that his prose reverberates with the susceptibility to despair that he found his strength in trying to assuage. It is bracingly all-encompassing, yet intimately personal. He has found a way of using the grammar of his emotional life in which pain is regulated as it is registered. A radical, all-per-vading despair which he does not define he nonetheless communicates with a fullness that tempers its force. He has learned what those who seek therapy are still learning: how to speak his own language. And to do this, emotionally no less than linguistically, we must learn enough about our own gramma
r to be able to stop thinking about it and attune our speech to our souls.
* * * * * * *
Westminster Abbey Unvisited
Perhaps one day of lonely light among
The plane trees that for all their loftiness
Were still content to shelter me before
Lovers shuddered, blanched and shifted tense,
The path across the open lawn of judgement
Will swerve into the backwoods of desire
And I will stand before this empty place
Where you do not repose, but where
I watched a father, widowed, harrowed, weightless
As a face upon the winds of love forlorn
Tumble headlong into an abyss,
While tourists behind cameras trailed and yawned
61. Lewis, Experiment in Criticism, 140–41.
62. Ibid.
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And I will think of how I turned to you,
Knowing no more about you than your name,
Discovered on the gravestone of a book
You’d climb from into gazebos of fame.
In a silence rinsed of acclamation
Maybe we will meet. You’ll wear no gown.
I’ll be singing silently of mountains,
You of Oxford in the midst of County Down.
You’ll say few words and I will listen
As inner doors of reticence spring open
All the losses that affinities alight on
Now healed and rivers free to run and shine.
And all your lovers gathered here invisibly
Not reading the letters you slip away beneath,
Will watch for the child among the huddled students
Building a city out of gilt and dreams.
8th November 2013
15
“It Makes No Difference”
Lewis’s Criticism, Fiction, and Theology
Stephen Prickett 1
I had heard of Lewis before I entered Trinity Hall as an undergraduate in 1958, but the only thing I had read by him was The Screwtape Letters, and I had this mental picture of him as looking very much like I had imagined Screwtape himself—tall and distinguished, with black hair, a long thin face, with a small black pointed beard—and dressed entirely in black, rather like an austere sixteenth-century Spanish courtier, or, not unconnectedly, more or less like the Devil himself. My shock when this jolly-looking, rather stout and florid character in an old tweed jacket, walking with the aid of a stick, entered our first-year lecture theatre in Mill Lane was all the greater. The Devil had turned into a jovial farmer. His lectures were not particularly jovial, I have to add, nor were they saturnine—nor, unlike many lecturers were they remotely self-indulgent. They began at ten past the hour and finished at precisely ten to the hour. Forty minutes was quite enough for any lecture, he explained. They were precise, thorough, clear, and well-delivered.
So matter-of-fact was he in general that it was a complete shock when one day—somewhere about the middle of the Michaelmas term—he said something extraordinary. “I want to say something about myself,” he began: 1. Dr. Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, a Chair he held from 1990–2007. He is the author of several books, including Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Victorian Fantasy (Baylor University Press, 2005).
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I have been accused of being a Christian, and filling my lec-
tures with Christian propaganda. It is perfectly true that I am a
Christian—but I strongly deny that it has made any difference
to my teaching. There is good teaching and there is bad teach-
ing. I hope I have always been a good teacher. Be that as it may,
it is a verifiable fact that I did not alter my mode of teaching
in any way when I became a Christian. Though I have written
Christian apologetic, the Cambridge English Faculty is not the
place for it. I talk about religion in my lectures because they are about mediaeval literature, and mediaeval literature is all about
religion. As a teacher, however, whether I am a Christian or an
atheist should make no difference at all.
There must have been students there who understood what this was
all about—some guessed it had to do with his well-known quarrel with F. R.
Leavis—but we were freshmen and I think it went over the heads of most of us. We were all prepared to agree on the importance of being a good teacher, and most of us would agree that Lewis was an excellent one. Only later, reading about John Betjeman’s furious clashes with Lewis in his Oxford tutorials did it occur to me that there might be more to this than appeared at the time.
When on retirement I found myself teaching in an Evangelical Baptist university in Texas, I found that Lewis was revered among my students as more or less the literary equivalent of a saint. The glow of stardust from my presence in those first year lectures in Mill Lane, it seems, still clung about me, and had I said that whatever opinion I happened to hold at any particular moment I had got from the mouth of the master, my authority would have been absolute. What in fact I told them was what I had just told you—and this probably destroyed my credibility for ever. It was axiomatic for the Baptists of Baylor that Christian teaching was fundamentally different from any other form. The university even had a special unit devoted to the practice of “Christian teaching”—and, needless to say, Lewis was its patron saint, the great exemplum.
That uncharacteristic interjection in Lewis’s lecture, which I had almost forgotten until I reached Texas, has, however, made me turn back to Lewis’s own work in a new way. That flat statement, that what he happened to believe personally “made no difference” to how he taught, suddenly took on a quite new significance. And that is my theme in this paper today.
With the exception of Screwtape, my initial reading of Lewis had con-centrated almost entirely on his criticism. If you are taking Part I of the English Tripos, it is a good idea to know what the professor who will be marking much of your work has written—and, for me, The Allegory of Love was an enthralling introduction to mediaeval literature. (As it happens, I
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had Lewis for Part II as well—but that was modern stuff anyway . . . .) Later, when I had time for frivolous things, I read the Narnia stories (I was too old for them as a child), the science fiction, the more philosophical novels, Till We Have Faces, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and best of all for me, The Great Divorce—which I have re-read many times since. Returning to Lewis’s criticism now, however, it strikes me as never before how much of a piece all his writings are. Everything is connected with everything else.
That is true, even with his worst criticism. Lewis’s 1939 collection, Rehabilitations contains some very bad essays—and one very entertaining one, which I shall return to later. Perhaps the most surprising thing, however, in view of Lewis’s later reputation, is how theoretical much of his criticism actually is. When not writing about mediaeval literature (and sometimes even then) he was constantly seeking to establish clear guidelines as to how one should go about reading literature—any literature. There should be a set of guiding principles over and above the response to any particular work—that should be the same for any rational person. But those principles should be flexible enough to cope with an encounter with the new. And this, of course, is directly related to his belief that the religious or philosophical orientation of the reader should make no difference to the kind of judgements or conclusions reached. He even writes of what he calls “the Way,” a kind of love-your-neighbour, do justly, behave honestly, code that he claimed was basically common not merely to all major religions, but to secular moral codes a
s well—a kind of Vincentian Canon for the human race. Some may feel that he is over-confident in this assumption of common ground, whatever the starting point, but I think there is no doubt that this is what Lewis believed.
Not surprisingly, given this belief in a broad base of common humanity for all readers, Lewis was forced to make his distinctions between effective and ineffective critical reading on a different system of criteria. And here he found himself in conflict with the very academic discipline he had done so much to foster: the university study of English literature. This, he concludes sadly,
directs to the study of literature a great many talented, ingenious, and diligent people whose real interests are not specifically literary at all. Forced to talk about books, what can they do but try
to make books into the sort of things they can talk about? Hence
literature becomes for them a religion, a philosophy, a school
of ethics, a psychotherapy, a sociology—anything other than a
collection of works of art.2
2. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 86.
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Part of Lewis’s dislike of what he saw as an unconscious displacement activity is simply the irritation of someone who was deeply into religion, philosophy, and ethics—and certainly knew and drew from both psychotherapy and sociology—as well as, of course, literature itself. His insistence that art was none of the above was because he actually knew all of the above very well. He was also very well aware of the dangers attendant on such subjectivity.
